Roma and Torino are today named the two “most flirtatious cities” in Italy by the compilers of the largest ever study of online flirting. Roma, Torino and Bari are all named among the ten most flirtatious cities in the world.

Roma and Torino rank just ahead of Bari, Bologna and Milano in an “Italian Flirtation League”, compiled by Badoo.com (www.badoo.com), the world’s largest social networking site for meeting new people, with over six million users in Italy and 108 million chatting and flirting across the world.

Athens, the capital of Greece, tops Badoo’s “World Flirtation League”, which ranks cities by the number of online flirtations initiated per month by the average Badoo user in each. The rankings are based on an analysis of 12 million flirtatious contacts made during a month on Badoo.

Italy, however, is the only country to boast three cities in the world top 10. Torino and Roma are the joint eighth most flirtatious cities in the world, just behind Tunis, Kiev and Beirut in the world rankings. Bari is Italy’s third most flirtatious city and the tenth most flirtatious in the world.

“This is an impressive result for Italy”, says Lloyd Price, Badoo’s Director of Marketing. “No other country has more than one city in the world top 10.”

The average Badoo user in both Roma and Torino initiates 23.7 online flirtations per month. This is fractionally more than in Bari (23.6), Bologna (23.5) or Milano (23.4) but two flirtations per month less than in Athens (25.7), the most flirtatious city in the world.

Badoo users in Roma, Torino and Bari initiate almost twice as many flirtations per month as those in Rio (12.4) Warsaw (12.1) or Prague (12.6) and far more than in Paris (20.7), London (19.0), Berlin (17.7) or New York (16.1).

Palermo is the sixth most flirtatious city in Italy, according to the Badoo rankings. It is followed by Napoli and Firenze, while Genova and Catania complete Italy’s top 10.

“Love is a serious mental disease”, said Plato, philosopher of ancient Athens. The great man never shared his views on online flirting but he knew something at least about offline flirting, suggests Dr Simon Hardy, a British academic and author of the book, “The Greeks, Eroticism and Ourselves”: “It is probably fair to say that the Athenians perfected the art of flirtation in ancient times, especially at the time of symposia described by Plato” [“Symposia” were drinking parties, where men would flirt with dancing girls.]

“Did the Romans also perfect the art of flirtation in ancient times?”, asks Lloyd Price of Badoo. “It is striking that while Athens tops our World Flirtation League, Roma ranks joint top in Italy, and joins Athens in the world top 10.”

This raises an interesting question, says Price: “Did the ancient Athenians and Romans give us not just so much of our philosophy, architecture and civilisation but also the art of flirting itself?”